We’ve run Q&As with the teams inside cord’s Hiring Leaders Awards winners, to understand the challenges, initiatives, and top tips they recommend to improve your candidate experience.

Read the full answers from Humaans & Fifth Dimension AI below, or read our summary of the key action points from all the companies involved.

Sam Merron, Humaans

Sam is an experienced Talent Acquisition Manager with 16 years working in the industry. He's worked for companies such as Lytt and Bboxx, before joining Humaans earlier this year. Sam is also actively involved in the hiring community, previously working with HIGHER (formerly DBR) and currently being Community Manager at The Talent Community.

Humaans is an HR Platform for modern teams. They're building a new kind of employee management platform designed to help teams operate collaboratively. Their goal is to automate the full employment lifecycle and turn complex manual processes, such as onboarding, offboarding, promotions, compensation management, and more, into simple workflows.

1) How do you measure the success of your candidate experience?

Candidate experience can be measured in multiple ways, with a successful hire who has been briefed, updated and moved through the interview stages in a timely manner, the excitement to join the company is clear.

On the other hand, when candidates do not make it through interview stages it is important to give the same high level of interview process with detailed, constructive feedback afterwards to ensure the candidate has had a great experience. You can measure this by how the candidate stays in touch in the future, buys into your employee brand and feels like they can apply again in the future.

2) What are the biggest challenges you face in being able to provide an excellent candidate experience? How did you overcome these?

It would be great to give detailed feedback to every candidate that applies and doesn’t make it to the initial call but with volume/workload it’s not possible for recruitment teams to do that. An automated but personable rejection email can help with this. Every ATS I have used supports this so I’m unsure why not letting candidates know they were unsuccessful at first stage still happens.

Timelines and diary management can also be a challenge. Recruitment teams are often working with hiring managers who are already very busy so being able to facilitate interviews into a busy schedule can be a challenge. As a hiring manager, part of your job is recruitment so time to do so should always be prioritised.

3) What are the key initiatives you’ve implemented that have had the biggest impact on candidate experience?

Getting the most out of your ATS really helps with candidate experience. Being able to schedule interviews, provide updates & feedback, manage integrations with sourcing tools all in one place is crucial. I really like how Ashby & Workable do this because not only makes the life of recruitment teams much easier, but it also gives the candidates who are interviewing at the company a better chance of having a great candidate experience.

4)What are the top tips you’d give to other companies looking to improve their candidate experience?

Treat people with respect, they have taken their time to apply/interview at your company so the least you can do is keep them updated and further on provide feedback from an interview Utilise your tools. As above make sure your ATS is firing on all cylinders Interviewing should be a 2 way process so make sure you leave the candidate you are meeting with all of the relevant information they need to make an informed decision about joining the right company

Chen Wang, Fifth Dimension AI

Chen is a GenAI Experimentalist and Founding Engineer at Fifth Dimension AI. Chen is also the only contributor who's day-to-day job isn't recruitment, but that hasn't stopped him from building an award-winning candidate experience!

Fifth Dimension AI is a technology company dedicated to bringing artificial intelligence to the real estate and finance industries. The company's flagship product, Ellie, is a powerful AI partner that automates and optimises tasks for professionals in these fields.

1) How do you measure the success of your candidate experience?

Through both quantitative metrics and qualitative data.

• For quantitative metrics, Cord is doing a great job in tracking things such as response-rate and time-to-response at the top of the funnel, while our own ATS gives us more data throughout the hiring pipeline for things such as pipeline-speed-per-stage that are relevant to candidate experience.

• We also find direct candidate feedback helpful, which can come from different stages of an interview process. For instance, during screening/1st call, we tend to hear feedback about our job ad (clarify of the job description, missing information etc.) while post decision time, we get responses from candidates who usually comment about their views on the process too.

We tweak our process as a result.

2) What are the biggest challenges you face in being able to provide an excellent candidate experience? How did you overcome these?

Having sat at both sides of the hiring table, TIME is probably the hardest part for both candidates and us hiring. Generally moving fast with a short process is preferred by candidates but as a company we also need to make sure the process is fair and thorough for us to develop the confidence and conviction for every hire (and rejection too). It’s exaggerated by us being a small team dealing with a good number of candidates from top of the hiring funnel.

Another important topic is RESPECT.

• Related to the TIME aspect above, respecting candidates’ time commitment during the interview process is important for us. For certain stages such as take-home assignment that requires large amounts of time from candidates, we aim to not only give individual feedback for each submission but also reuse the submission during later stages as part of the interview discussion to better utilise the sunk time commitment.

• Truly listening to candidates is another way to respect them during the process. For instance during the first call with candidates, we not only offer a clear window into how we work as a team but also try to understand what candidates are looking for at this stage of their career; sometimes the roles we’re hiring for may not be the ideal fit for them and for us, this is still a good outcome for both parties. Without actively listening to candidates, they could find themselves in a wrong process and/or we could have mismatched candidates deep in the process, both of which are not optimal.

• Respect also goes beyond just time. The key principle we abide by is that we should treat candidates the way we wanted to be treated if we were in their position, which includes (not limited to) rescheduling upon request due to personal circumstances and leaving meaningful feedback post-process.

3) What are the key initiatives you’ve implemented that have had the biggest impact on candidate experience?

As an early stage startup with a strong emphasis on our own values, it’s important to identify candidates who recognise our culture and work well with existing team members. Although we’re not a 5-day-a-week in-office company, we value human connections and the only viable way to establish that during the interview process is to add more in-person elements.

For engineering hiring, we switched our final stage to an onsite interview where candidates get to sit with not only their future engineering peers to look at our codebase, but also their future colleagues in other parts of the company, in-person at our office. We’re very transparent as a company so hopefully it offers candidates a glimpse of what it’s like actually working here.

4) What are the top tips you’d give to other companies looking to improve their candidate experience?

• Respond to messages from every applicant in a polite and timely manner (within 24hrs for first contact and 2 to 3 days for later stages)

• Aim to give feedback for every candidate; especially for those who spend considerable amount of time in the interview process, a detailed feedback is a must-do for every candidate

• Proactively seek feedback on their experience, which could be via a feedback link/form at the end of the process, or asked verbally during the process

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